WE OPEN THE CITY

We believe that Bucharest awaits being discovered, recovered and set in motion. For the past few years we’ve all turned to new perspectives, but there’s room for more. The city holds unfathomed forgotten spaces that, once brought into the open, can link the city’s past with its future. We believe in activists, ecologists, programmers, engineers, artists, designers, anthropologists, landscape architects, journalists, cineastes, architects and city planners that can and will work together, to set the basis for a new better Bucharest. Will you join us?

TOGETHER

we wish to form a young, creative, multi-disciplinary professional team whose members responsibly and methodically learn and grow together

PARTNERS

Art Safari, Artmark, SinCronic, ART7, ARGO, Urban Scenarios for Bucharest, Fundația Comunitară București have been with us since the beginning. The friends who have encouraged and counseled us are Urban INC, MKBT and ARCEN. Those who shaped our words and ideas are Laura Iane and VÂNĂ. And those who offered us support, even if we had just gotten introduced, are New Concept Travel – American Express.

If you want to help us with a donation, download, fill in and file until March 25 th the D200 or D230 form.

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WE ARE

two architects, two city planners and a film producer. All five of us have a common goal: to make Bucharest a more open and livable city

WHO?

Maria Duda studied architecture in the same Swiss village as Matei Bogoescu, a small forgotten place where the only options were dining, talking and working together with the other 150 foreign students and teachers. Matei went on for masters studies in Delft, where he met Alexandru Belenyi, freshly escaped from Bucharest’s academic system. Once returned home, they all went into teaching: Maria teamed up with Raluca, also freshly back from Leuven, at Spiru, while Matei and Alex held studios in City Planning at Mincu. Ștefan Hillerin is the one changing the variables in our matrix and giving us a different grasp on reality. He is a cinematographer and film producer, and while also working with people, places and ideas, his views and experience enhance our take on things. Since last winter BAZA welcomed two honorary members: Adrian Buga, art historian and curator, and Alexandru Dumitrescu, a lawyer with a passion for socio-cultural projects.

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BAZA

is an urban initiative set to unleash Bucharest’s latent energies

HOW?

1. BAZA opens buildings, streets, minds and urban treasures
2. BAZA is the place we gather to in order to change the city
3. BAZA welcomes and grows the active fresh minds of the city
4. BAZA hosts plans, ideas, dreams and revolutions, but mostly evolutions
5. BAZA desires a present and a future. The past holds back
6. BAZA intervenes in the city, offering it new approaches and dimensions
7. BAZA understands the city because it does not believe, it seeks
8. BAZA listens, writes, reads, podcasts, webs and publishes
9. BAZA makes up a new Bucharest onto the old one’s structure
10. BAZA denies recipes, elitism, long speeches, star systems and stubborn freezes in the project!

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WE MAKE AND REMAKE / LITTLE IMPROVEMENTS

We intervene in urban spaces, taking on social and cultural issues in ways that improve the city’s texture. This is just a first step. Next, we will be setting up an all-round professional network of young activators that will set Bucharest moving.

we actively research

the city, immersing ourselves in its urban situations. We look for the questions that start dialogues with the public we then involve into understanding and critically searching for answers and solutions.

we counsel and propose

means to better and promote the city’s livability and urban culture.

we test and intervene

applying the minimal intervention that generates the largest impact, offering that substantial, but unexplored, improvement.

we educate and podcast

organizing workshops, public debates and guided tours, writing articles and collecting personal stories of the young professionals of Bucharest.

PORTFOLIO

our factual declaration of ideas and ideals, beginnings and (r)evolutions

Little Improvements – A Stair for Kretzulescu
This project is a pilot for introducing an element that articulates three public spaces used by different social and age categories: the Kretzulescu Galleries, the Kretzulescu Church and...

Following the Sustainabili...really? workshop, some of the attending pupils contacted us for advice on setting up their own informal classroom, within their college. The director of Spiru Haret National College had granted them permission...

The proposal for a workshop on sustainability, addressing 14 to 16 year olds, came from Club Interact Cișmigiu, themselves highscool students. As the term gets around a lot but is only razingly explained or understood...

Setting a life's story in symbols, and bringing mythology closer through drawings, the artist Jana Gertler and the curator Adrian Buga transformed the foyer of the theatre in a kaleidoscope of colours and light....

The ground-floor, four street windows and one entrance of Cesianu Racovita Palace are returned to interacting with pedestrian public space. Setting the formerly unused space with art exhibitions of collections up for sale, the...

BLOG – Urban Experience

Our Urban Experience talks gather the stories of Bucharest’s young activators. With the support of our partners, Radio Seven and ART7, we share the personal and professional experience of those who contribute to Bucharest’s urban culture, shape its social communities, and push the city towards an open and responsible development. Their own trails make for Bucharest’s human map, and we are here to connect the dots.